The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt

by David Giffels

Overview

Award-winning author and journalist David Giffels explores the meaning of identity and place, hamburgers, hard work, and basketball in this collection of wry, irreverent essays reflecting on the many aspects of Midwestern culture and life from an insider’s perspective.

In The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels takes us on an insider’s journey through the wreckage and resurgence of America’s Rust Belt. A native who never knew the good times, yet never abandoned his hometown of Akron, Giffels plumbs the touchstones and idiosyncrasies of a region where industry has fallen, bowling is a legitimate profession, bizarre weather is the norm, rock ’n’ roll is desperate, thrift store culture thrives, and sports is heartbreak. Intelligent, humorous, and warm, Giffels’s linked essays are about coming of age in the Midwest and about the stubborn, optimistic, and resourceful people who prevail there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451692747
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	03/18/2014
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,264,357
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Giffels is the author of The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt, nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the memoir All the Way Home, winner of the Ohioana Book Award, and Furnishing Eternity. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic.com, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, Grantland.com, Redbook, and many other publications. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.

Table of Contents

Part 1 The Heart of the Heart of it All 1

The Chosen Ones 3

Stones 19

Popular Stories for Boys 29

Delta Lows 42

The Lake Effect 55

All Stars 65

Kareem's the One with the Glasses, Right? 72

Part 2 Be Approximately Yourself 87

Looking for a Name 89

Working Hard or Hardly Working? 100

Cutting the Mustard 107

Houserockers 116

Trapped in a World That They Never Made 125

867-5309: A Love Song 140

Part 3 Local Men 145

The Taj Mahal 147

The Poet's Assistant 161

Apartment X 168

Anarchy Girls 176

Part 4 The Middle is Near 191

Battleground 193

Demolition 214

Do Not Cry for Me, Arizona 221

Pretty Vacant 233

Unreal Estates 242

Ascent 250

Acknowledgments 255

Editorial Reviews

Though he revels in the foibles of his city, Giffels defends it vigorously, not unlike the way Carl Hiaasen lambastes Florida developers, Kevin Cullen rages against Boston gangsters or David Simon illuminates the scars of Baltimore. A region on the mend has found its voice…

The New York Times Book Review - Beth Macy

01/20/2014
A native Ohioan who’s always lived in his home town of Akron, Giffels—an English professor and author of three books—has a unique perspective on Midwestern history. His latest book is a collection of articles written on the distinctive culture of adversity and loss experienced by those in the Midwest who have seen everything taken from them, from their factory jobs to their rock bands and even their sports icons. Giffels treats all these things with equal gravitas, an approach that lends itself both to his signature dry humor and to a heartfelt analysis of what drives his neighbors to continue. We follow Giffels in a roughly chronological journey through his life, beginning with his school days and ending with his son’s first attempt at driving. Along the way Giffels riffs on varying subjects like the origin of hamburgers, his own poetry, and bowling’s vital importance to the Rust Belt, in abrupt asides that are sometimes in desperate need of segues. Regardless, the portrait painted here is an honest and revealing one, illuminating the cultural factors that have given a strange, shadowy sort of hope to millions of Americans. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

David Giffels writes straight into the heart of Akron, Ohio, the place we both call home. It’s a hard place to be from, which is why it makes such a good story. What other place could have spawned Jim Jarmusch, LeBron James, Lux Interior and the Goodyear blimp? So it’s no accident that this book reads like the American soul—wicked and sincere and ingeniously weird. It is a great story, an authentic one about the way people protect the places they love, and The Hard Way on Purpose gets it exactly right.

Patrick Carney

They still build souls in Akron. The Hard Way on Purpose is proof. David Giffels is a Rust Belt prophet, laughing—sometimes through his tears—in Doom’s face. You want to hear America singing? Buy this book.

Scott Raab

"[Giffels] gives you the Midwestern experience, from hoping your greatest sports star will choose his hometown over the bright lights, big city (in this case, LeBron James, who famously didn’t keep playing for his hometown) to the search for the perfect bowling shirt."

Flavorwire

"This collection of essays about life in Akron, Ohio, is so deep and inviting and surprising that I plan to carry a bunch in my trunk. Then, instead of mounting the Heartland defense, I’ll just throw the bigmouth fucknut in question a copy of Giffels’ masterwork and let it do the talking."

Washington Independent Review of Books Eric Nuzum

This amazing book will resonate with anyone who’s ever loved a hometown, wherever it might be—especially if it’s the kind of hometown people usually leave. Even if you’ve never been to Akron, Giffels brilliantly captures how it feels to love your city fiercely, even when it’s falling apart. He celebrates Akron as ‘the Paris of hard times.’ Giffels might be its Baudelaire.

Rob Sheffield

Giffels’ voice is friendly.…his details so vibrant and fresh. . . . A region on the mend has found its voice.

The New York Times Book Review

"Let this heartfelt collection of essays by David Giffels reveal the wit and pride that are beyond all our preconceptions of Akron, Ohio."

|Los Angeles Times

Occasionally, an essayist so perfectly chronicles a specific place that he or she becomes synonymous with it. Joseph Mitchell and New York; Joan Didion and California; Adam Gopnik and Paris; John Jeremiah Sullivan and the American South. With The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels has pulled a chair up to this lofty literary table, and in so doing, provided the hardscrabble industrial Midwest with its own lyrical, learned, and very large-hearted champion.

David Goodwillie

"Let this heartfelt collection of essays by David Giffels reveal the wit and pride that are beyond all our preconceptions of Akron, Ohio."

Los Angeles Times

2014-02-05
Appealing, original fusion of personal essay collection and Rust Belt post-mortem. Giffels (English/Univ. of Akron; All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, 2008, etc.) takes an audacious approach to considering his 1970s adolescence in Akron, Ohio, and his life there ever since. He became aware of the hardscrabble region's ingrained traditions and civic pride as they were being blown away by its declining economic infrastructure. While his essays are funny and crisply rendered, there's an undertone of wonderment at the sheer loss of functionality and productive might in such places: "Generations knew this part of the country as the region that built modern America," writes the author. "I'm of the first generation that never saw any of that." The essays sketch a rough arc of Giffels' life as set against the rambling decay of postindustrial Akron and Cleveland (where his family rooted for the perpetually losing Browns and Cavaliers). As the author reached adolescence, caroused within the region's vibrant underground-rock scene and began a career at the Akron Beacon Journal, he realized that the physical entropy and economic marginalization of the region somehow fueled its survivors with a perverse vitality as they attempted to make art or music or simply survive. "Recognizing the value of forgotten or broken things seems, at least in my part of the country, to be the story of America in the twenty-first century," he writes. Standout essays include an account of watching the cavernous used bookstore that sparked his literary passion burn down, his hilarious season as a ball boy for the dispirited Cavaliers and youthful encounters with regional traditions: strong drink, bowling, thrift stores and punk rock. The author's tone is relaxed and approachable, yet he never loses sight of the social costs incurred by the alleged obsolescence of the blue-collar Midwest. These seasoned dispatches convey an important narrative of regional marginalization; Giffels' work deserves to avoid that fate.

Kirkus Reviews

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